Transition Town Tooting

Tag: Volunteering

  • TTT 2016 Gardening Celebration tonight!

    Tonight is the TTT 2016 Gardening Celebration – plus we’re looking forward to exciting things in 2017. The event is at The Selkirk near Tooting Broadway from 7:00 pm.

    To celebrate the celebration:
    here are five current growing, gardening and sustainability events and ideas to follow up even if you can’t make it tonight:

    1 TTT attended the bi-annual Wildlife Gardening Forum last week at the Natural History Museum. This is always an amazing and cross-cutting event with around 100 participants – private gardeners, schools, local authorities, biodiversity and growing charities, researchers, enterprises.

    The theme this time was learning from European experience in Germany, Belgium, Austria the Netherlands, Ireland (oh, and Scotland).
    Why learn from Europe? Click on the photo…

    We learned a German word – schwammstadt  – meaning ‘sponge city’. A sponge city is redesigned to be responsive and adaptive to climate change impact and allow for more natural rainfall retention, reducing runoff. (See the event on December 8th in para 4 below).
    Anyone can attend the Forum; it’s a great day when you can meet experts and work out what ideas you can use yourself. And all the presentations appear for free on the WLGF website in due course.

    2 TTT joined Capital Growth’s ‘Roots to Growth’ workshop.
    We looked at the experience and potential of farming as an enterprise within London.

    There’s tons of good info on the Capital Growth site – all these reports are free downloads.

    While the pleasure and impact of growing together is not only about saving money and managing our budgets, what do you think is the annual value of the crops grown by 2000 London gardens linked to Capital Growth? Include crops for sharing, not only veg which are sold, so you can include Tooting Community Garden’s pumpkins in the calculation. Have a guess – the answer is at the end of this blog.
    We could take up the challenge of recording our crops – see the Harvest-ometer from Sustain.  
    This kind of data is very valuable in order to be able to make our case for more growing in London!
    TTT’s friend Mark at Vertical Veg has documented the equivalent value of what he grows – click here to read about it.

    Plus here’s a great idea: three new projects each pitched their idea for two minutes – and we voted during the day so that one project won £50, one £100 and one £150.
    You really can make your point in two minutes – it was very impressive!

    3 We hosted a meeting with the RHS
    The Royal Horticultural Society supported our 2015-16 Rooting in Tooting project via their Greening Grey Britain campaign. Ten days ago we met Brid O’Dwyer from the RHS for a ‘walk and talk’ around Tooting to discuss our own experience of urban growing and what gardens like ours look for in terms of support. At the same time the RHS is refining its own approaches to supporting community projects. We had a short chat with Sarah Bailes at Share Community gardens in Springfield Hospital:

    There the conversation included making the RHS certification schemes accessible to a wider audience, for example people with a range of learning difficulties.

    4 Looking forward, TTT is a partner in a 2017 hot-composting project originated by our friend Martin (who ran most of Growing Tooting earlier this year). This project has received support from Wandsworth Borough Council, and will ask individuals, families and schools to compare experience of using hot composting bins. Please contact TTT for information.

    5 Also looking forwards, on 8th December Joanna Ecclestone from London Wildlife Trust will be speaking at the Wandsworth Environment Forum about the benefits of replacing areas of paving with planting to create rain gardens. Free to join in, details here.

    Early in 2016 TTT also helped build a green roof at Brockwell Park Community Greenhouses, a project funded from the London Wildlife Trust. Green roofs have exactly that purpose of allowing downpours to slow down and soak into soil rather than being trapped by paving. That’s urgent, and not just a ‘nice to do’ in areas prone to flooding.
    Plus on December 8th there will a special TTT prize for anyone who uses the word schwammstadt.

    Good Growing and enjoy the celebration this evening!
    PS the value of crops grown in London in spaces linked to Capital Growth is over £2 million – see the Reaping Rewards report

  • Gardens of Refuge: yes we are through to the finals of the Aviva Community Fund!

    Brilliant success at the voting stage: Aviva Community Fund has just confirmed that we’re through to the finals for the Gardens of Refuge project! 
     
    We now do some further application steps by December 7th, and then there’s judging and then the results are announced January 10th ’17.
    Great news & thanks for all the support!
     

    To see the project description, click here: https://goo.gl/y6b66Y

  • First feedback after voting closed Friday 18th on Gardens of Refuge via Aviva Community Fund

    We’re proud to share where we reached when voting closed yesterday on the Gardens of Refuge campaign with CARAS.   
    Over 600 people supported the project online.
    We believe we came THIRD, with over 6200 votes. 
    WHICH IS WONDERFUL!

    Our formal ranking will be confirmed on 22nd Nov by Aviva & we’ll communicate wider after then. 

    If we’re in the top 4 in our project category, we go through to the next round – to a more familiar bid process.

    By the way votes went from 3400 on Weds morning to 6200 by lunchtime yesterday!

    Thanks for your votes, patience and energy in this period of repeated messages and nudges in every medium possible, dominating the TTT airwaves.

    Normal service can soon be resumed on communicating the rest of TTT’s rolling projects.

    Every vote really did count!

  • Please vote by 12:00 Friday November 18th for ‘Gardens of Refuge’ project funding from Aviva

    This week is the home straight for voting online for funding support for Gardens of Refuge at the Aviva Community Fund. It will come down to our tally of votes at the end of 18th November, and of course the other ‘Aviva projects’ are also doing a push this week.

    Please vote by Friday 12:00 for Gardens of Refuge, and ask your family and friends to vote too. Together we can support this creative and forward-looking Tooting partnership project with the refugee and asylum-seeker community centred on the Tooting charity CARAS.
    Every Vote Counts, and every vote is appreciated!

    How to vote?
    You have to register individually before you can vote. To register, please click here for the Aviva webpage
    Then search for CARAS or Gardens of Refuge to vote!

    Project Details:
    Read the description of the project online here.

    For the future: bulbs for 2017

    You’ll see that the project is all about growing the therapeutic benefits of gardening plus greening the community we share in Tooting.
    And it’s about building ways to enable refugees to share their own knowledge and skills locally.
    Together we’ll imagine and create a more beautiful neighbourhood as a legacy for all.

    Legacy: flourishing from 2015’s cuttings
    There are three partners in Gardens of Refuge:

    CARAS – with whom we have worked in depth for 18 months on Rooting in Tooting.

    The Grange – a residential respite and permaculture centre in Norfolk who work with CARAS. Please see The Grange.

    & Transition Town Tooting


     Thank you so much for your support & please vote by 12:00 on 18th Nov!

  • Celebrating and sharing learning from our experience of ‘Rooting in Tooting’

    This autumn TTT is delighted to be able to contribute to events to share our learning from Rooting in Tooting (our joint project with the refugee and asylum seeker community served by CARAS)
    It’s brilliant to be meeting new people and groups, and sharing in different ways: thank you for the invitations!
    We certainly don’t ‘have all the answers’ but we would like to join others in asking questions and sharing practice.

    There are 4 very diverse autumn 2016 events where we’re celebrating or telling the Rooting in Tooting story:

    1 The Royal Horticultural Society OneRHS managers conference

                      Credit: RHS / Julian Weigall

    CARAS & TTT were honoured to be the only outside speakers at this event for 175 RHS managers. We had fascinating discussions about how the RHS can most effectively engage with community projects.

    2 Team London Volunteer Awards 2016
    TTT is thrilled to be on the awards shortlist in the Greening & Cleaning category of the Awards. We’ll be joining other voluntary groups for the ceremony. Here’s the Mayor’s tweet on Monday morning: @MayorofLondon @SadiqKhan will celebrate the capital’s volunteering heroes at tonight’s #TeamLdnAwards at City Hall.

     

    3 Cause2Create: “where we find specific, targeted solutions to challenges posed by the refugee crisis”
    We’re invited to Cause2Create’s ‘hack’ weekend. “We know we’re not going to solve the refugee crisis in one weekend, but we can explore some of the specific challenges and develop scalable and actionable solutions.”

    4 International Volunteering Conference at City Hall, celebrating London as European Volunteering Capital 2016
    CARAS & TTT are co-facilitating one of the conference workshops in December. Joining in with the Greek volunteering NGO Ethelon, the aim is to explore training and community engagement aspects of working well with refugees. What benefits do both refugees and communities experience when working together?
    During the year we also:

    • Explored the project in an Outdoor Learning workshop at the Transition Network International Conference in Sept ’15 (linked to experience with Gatton School, NCS The Challenge, Tooting Field Days & the Tooting Community Garden).
    • Described the project at the Transition Network Day in Paris alongside the COP 21 climate change talks in December ’15.

    Interesting learning about project management is that none of these events was specifically planned when we started out in spring 2015. In the project plan we agreed that we wanted to share learning, and then be ready for serendipity and emerging opportunity.

    It was good luck and being flexible that we were able to link refugee Youth Club young people with Border Control, the concept garden at the RHS Hampton Court Flower Show

    Rooting in Tooting has involved over 20 local individuals who freely gave their time and experience alongside CARAS staff and volunteers: thank you all!
    We also want to say a big thank-you to two project funders:

    • The Royal Horticultural Society’s Greening Grey Britain Campaign gave us materials and expert advice, and opened doors to new opportunities to add value to the project
    • Sir Walter St John’s Educational Charity voted funds which helped us recognise the contributions of key session facilitators, and paid for art materials

    Finally – you will have spotted that we now have a new project with refugees and asylum-seekers under development: a 3-way partnership called Gardens of Refuge.

    We’re asking for public votes from our friends and supporters (and their friends!) for funding via the Aviva Community Fund. 

    All the details are here, and thank you so much if you can take the time to register and vote for the project!